With the inspiration from our MIUI Forum administrator, Nana, I have decided to make my very own series named "MIUI With Marcus". The MWM series is written with a simple purpose - to let MIUI users know more about MIUI features. I will use my own knowledge and experiences to explain how to use the mentioned MIUI features. Feel free to correct me if I made any mistakes in explaining them.

In today series of MWM, we will talk about internal storage in our Xiaomi phones, which is the basic specification for every smartphones.

No matter what model of Xiaomi phones we are using now, everyone is concern about their phone storage usage, especially if we only have 16GB or 8GB of internal storage. Despite having the external storage, we cannot install apps in the external storage, which makes our phone limited to the internal storage. That's why memory management is very important for phone with little amount of internal storage.

I will share with you some quick tips on how to manage our phone memory easily with MIUI.

Storage Management

1) Cleaner in Security App

If you always follow and read threads in MIUI Forum, this feature will be common for you, but it might be new for some new MIUI users. Cleaner is basically the most essential feature of MIUI, eliminate the fact that we still need to depend on third party app to do the cleaning job. It is a proven effective feature to minimize our storage usage by apps.

We just have to go into Security App, tap on Cleaner, and it will collect any junk files and cache to be cleaned up.

After scanned, the cleaner will display every files that will be removed soon. We can manually select the files we want to exclude from clean up. For me, I will remove everything, so I tick all of them and then click "Clean Up". You will see an animation of files being vacuumed into a big hole and end with "No trash"!

p/s: After clean up, please stay on the current page to proceed next step!

2) Deep Clean after Cleaner

Deep clean is another hidden feature in Security App, which we can further remove duplicate media files and unused apps.

Photos

Deep clean feature will help us scan the duplicate photos with image processing, easier for us to select and remove duplicated photos. This feature will be the best for guys who like to take multiple same photos, to get the best out of the best, yet lazy to remove the redundant photos.

Apps

Other than that, deep clean feature also list out all the apps with use frequency order. Those apps which you installed but rarely open it, will be listed on top of it. From this, you can easily decide to remove those unused apps and clean up storage for more photos and videos!

App Data

App data also shown in Deep Clean page, where we can easily see the storage occupied by each app data in descending order, from large to small. However, I do not recommend you to remove app data, especially from game apps, as they are saved file and you will have to start from scratch if you remove them. Despite of cleaning it, this statistic able to show how much space taken by each app in our phones.

Big Files

Big files, regardless of the file type, will be shown in deep clean page as well. It will show the biggest independent file in our phone, from the largest to the not so large file. We can observe that our video files usually occupy most of the big files ranking in phone.

Delete Videos

Last but not least, all video files will be shown as the last category of the deep clean page. The video files are ordered from largest file size to smallest size. This is easy for us to select and remove those unwanted video to clear up some space in our phones.

3) Quick Cache Cleaning

Do you know that we can simply clear all cache in phone in our phone Settings? Simply go to Settings > Storage, and tap on "Cached data". It will prompt out "This will clear cached data for all apps", press OK.There's you go. You just cleared your cache data in one tap. Hands up if you have no idea about this hidden trick! p/s: We can access Cleaner feature from the Storage Settings as well.

4) Save Media at External Storage

Okay, this method is obviously only for phones with external storage. Most Redmi Series and Mi Max Series can follow this tips to maximize their internal storage.

Camera App

Photo and video files can take up a lot of space if you are a passionate photographer or just a plain person who like to record video. MIUI Camera App has the settings "Save to SD card", so that every photo and video recorded will be saved into external storage. This will obviously save up your internal storage for more apps.

Theme App

Image credit to @CLAYTON_WWC

If you love to change theme and wallpapers, then this setting change will be significant to your internal storage. Similar to MIUI Camera App, MIUI Theme App allows us to save theme and wallpapers in external storage as well. Just go to Settings > Theme, and hold on Menu button to go into its setting page. We will see a page like above screenshot.

5) WhatsApp Auto-Download Media

This might not be MIUI specific, but I believe most of us are using WhatsApp now and it will be useful for most of us. By default, WhatsApp will automatically download all media files when we are connected with Wi-Fi and only photos when connected with network data. Without realization, we will get a chunk of media files in our phone in few weeks if we have active WhatsApp group who love to share photos and videos.

To reduce these media files, we can simply turn off media auto-download in WhatsApp Settings. In WhatsApp App, click on top right of 3 dots and select Settings, then select Data Usage. We can see Media auto-download options with "When using mobile data", "When connected on Wi-Fi" and "When roaming".

Personally, I will uncheck all media (photos, audio, videos and documents) for mobile data, Wi-Fi and roaming. This mean we need to manually tap on the photos, videos or audio to download them. This way we can choose to download the media files by our WhatsApp buddies, not just blindly download them all.

This method not only save up our phone storage, but also help reduce mobile data usage.

Facts on Install App in External Storage

Here's a million dollar question related to storage:

"How can I install apps on SD card?"

I'm pretty sure you are looking for a solution on this, but I'm going to tell you that it isn't recommended. Unlike AOSP (Pure Android), MIUI does not support swap storage or move app to SD. There are a few reasons why MIUI does not provide support for this:

Executing app in external storage will be way slower than app in internal storage. This is because the read/write speed in external storage is way slower than the internal storage. We have to admit that native is always the best compare to the third parties.

Some apps will not support running in external storage. This may cause issues for users and then blame the phone for it.

There is a chance that after long usage, the SD card may corrupt and cause app force close issues. Again, another chance for users to blame the phone.

Well, instead of getting disappointed, why don't we just have a good practice on the above tricks to manage your storage efficiently? I know this might not be a nice statement for users with low phone storage, so feel free to give your opinions about this.

Disclaimer: This is purely my own personal opinions on this matter. It has nothing to do with Official Xiaomi or MIUI Authorities.

Verdict

The sufficiency of phone storage is very subjective on how users utilize their phone in daily life. Some users like to "bombard" their phone with massive amount of photos and videos, or being curious to try all the new apps from Play Store. If you are using a phone with little phone storage, this article might be a life saver for you today. Hopefully you guys can gain some knowledge on storage management!

Reply Awards +5

If your bootloader is unlocked, after gaining root access one can delete many large sized not-so-useful apps (as per your requirement) too. I managed to get about 300mb space cleared by removing many such applications.

Comment

marcus_keong
Root access always allow us to do it further, but it is risky and not every user know how to do it.
10:31, May-19-2017